cwash into software

Update: Sysinternals puts out some great developer friendly tools. They come in handy!
Update #2: I’ve made the switch to using Launchy over DOMercury.

Working on Windows XP is unavoidable at my job. While it’s not my favorite environment, I’ve found a decent baseline of software tools to augment the barebones OS that can get me to a place where it isn’t that bad. Note, I’m not including any tools for doing off-development related things, anything development related that is on the web or any cool plugins for any of these programs.

Here is what I need, in roughly the order I download them:

1. Firefox – I open IE, download Firefox with the purest intentions never to open IE again. Of course, my job gets in the way. I’ll save all the addons for this I install for a rainy day.
2. cygwin – first thing I do after making necessary LAF adjustments and installing Firefox. I don’t know how some people can survive without a robust command line… at the very least find, grep, sed, xargs. Also, if you don’t know what Ctrl+R does in Bash, check it out immediately.
3. Google Desktop – in lieu of not having Spotlight or anything similar, I set this to work early indexing
4. Eclipse – there is so much I use Eclipse for. Always one of my first downloads/installs even if it’s not needed immediately. Contains TCPMon, a Diff/Merge tool, great refactoring support, and about a million plugins to do many development tasks you’ll inevitably need to do (or want).
5. TCPMon – Whether you use Eclipse’s or some other, track this down and figure out how to use it. (HttpFox is great, but it can’t capture requests you make outside of the browser. Sorry, we’re not supposed to be talking about Firefox extensions, I know.)
6. Pidgin – best F/OS IM client out there for Windows (and other platforms). You can do some crazy stuff with Jabber, ladies and gents. But that’s another blog.
7. WinSCP – I don’t need to FTP or SCP files everyday, but when I do it’s usually easier to do it using WinSCP, and I can save my connection information incase I need to do something similar later.
8. PSPad – currently my favorite Windows-based “barebones++” text editor. In addition to the “coder-style” basics, a neat trick is that you can launch hyperlinks or filepaths by selecting and right-clicking.
9. vim – …Because none of these editors are perfect, though, I always keep ole’ vim on hand incase I get annoyed with PSPad. Honestly, I find myself in it just as frequently.
10. WinMerge – best F/OS Windows diff tool I know of – can compare directories which you can’t get the Eclipse merge tool to do.
11. SoapUI – general swiss army knife for anything related to web services. (Contains TCPMon, too.)
12. Squirrel – Ditch the Toad, go F/OS. Well, there is a free version of Toad but it can’t compete. As Jack White says, “Be like the squirrel.” Does whatever you want to a Database. Any database (well, almost). Written in Java, communicates using JDBC. Driver manager is a good way to get correct JDBC connection strings if you ever forget or can’t seem to get one right.
13. CommandBar – Found this mentioned in the Productive Programmer as a way to marry an Explorer and Cmd window. Comes in handy.
14. clcl – Another Productive Programmer recommendation for a simple multiple clipboard manager.
15. git – while I don’t always need this, I have been using it more lately because the version control software I have to comply with (eventually) on my current client sucks so mightily. I’m using git for day to day development and then I create a repo to interoperate with Harvest when I need to. (Be thankful you don’t have to use Harvest.)
16. DOMercury – Recent find that provides a Quicksilver-like launcher for Windows. It also includes an Alias manager. A priceless easter egg: ‘wtf’ launches IE. This sold me immediately. I’m not sure how well it keeps itself indexed, but I usually install it after everything else to keep it simple.

What am I leaving out? What kinds of things do you need to make your time in XP bearable?

More Related Content

• April 15, 2009 -- OSGi-ggity-Giggity (4)
• January 31, 2009 -- In response to Stackoverflow #38/”Quality Doesn’t Matter That Much” — Jeff and Joel (3)
• January 13, 2009 -- On Software Quality (8)
• December 1, 2008 -- 24ways (1)
• November 28, 2008 -- Must Haves/References For Modern Java EE Developers (1)
• August 2, 2008 -- How I Escape the “Reuse Trap” (0)
• March 19, 2008 -- New Wave Logging (0)